New Paltz, New York

IF you'd never seen a Neil LaBute play before True Love Will Find You in the End which opened recently at the Denizen Theatre here, you might be surprised by the huge twist that comes exactly two-thirds of the way through. I, on the other hand, having seen so many, dreaded the twist the whole time, as if watching an atomic clock count down to a cataclysm.

That's because LaBute's technique, hardened over the course of some 30 plays in 30 years, typically involves a sudden turn that realigns everything and leaves the audience feeling snookered. Why did we sit through the elaborate buildup, getting to know characters one way, only to learn they were secretly and not very logically another? Why did the plot turn out to be a mousetrap - with us as the mouse?

That this technique, however mechanical, actually serves the slim story of True Love is something I realised only after this two-character, 46-minute play was over. While in the theatre I just felt mystified and antsy.

Perhaps that was because I was in fact in a theatre for the first time since March 10. The Denizen, in this bustling college town, decided to produce the show in its black-box space when plans to do so as part of a live outdoor series at the Water Street Market were scotched by Covid-19. Bringing True Love safely indoors involved a major adjustment to director J J Kandel's production - and to the concept of in-person theatre. The audience would be present, but not the actors.

So, I found myself, along with seven other playgoers, seated along the perimeter of the Denizen's small square playing space. (We were all masked and more than 6 feet apart, with two people on each side of the square.) In the middle, where you would expect actors to be, scenic designer Marcele Mitscherlich had placed an abstract sculpture consisting of two metal bands overlapping on the floor; suspended above them, a third occasionally dripped water like a leaky shower.

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The two bands on the floor clearly represented wedding rings: Marriage, or at least adultery, is the play's subject. Perhaps the dripping band represented torture, for that was what it felt like to be so near the lost experience of theatre and yet still so far away from it. The actors, Gia Crovatin as a wife and KeiLyn Durrel Jones as a husband, were represented by their recorded voices only. As part of a soundscape by Nick Moore, their lines emerged from different empty parts of the room, which sometimes made the house feel haunted.

One of those LaBute peekaboos

But then so did the story, one of those LaBute peekaboos in which there are more holes than fabric. (The holes are where information has been suppressed, to permit the surprise later.) The wife talks about how an affair she almost fell into with a neighbour was interrupted by the pandemic and its restrictions, and how sequestration with her husband helped rekindle their love. The husband's testimony does not always match up, occasionally leading him to contradict her or merely say curtly, "No comment". That's all I can say about the plot, but you don't need spoilers to see the question it raises. Whom are the characters talking to? From their tone I sometimes thought they were being interviewed by a nosy lifestyle magazine, sometimes by a marriage counselor and sometimes by a police officer: There is, as always in LaBute, a cloud of menace over the proceedings. That menace is distributed unevenly; the wife, although less "likeable" than the husband - her detours around the truth amount to lies - gets the brunt of the double meaning of the play's title. You leave worried for her.

I've left lots of LaBute's plays worried for the women. Some critics and audience members, sensing that he is not just portraying degradation but valourising it, have written off his plays completely. In 2018, for reasons that have never been made public, MCC Theater and the Geffen Playhouse each cancelled a scheduled production of his work, and MCC ended its 15-year relationship with him, during which it had enjoyed major successes with Reasons to Be Pretty, Some Girl(s), Fat Pig and The Mercy Seat, among others.

True Love feels in some ways like a cryptic response to those criticisms after two years in the wilderness. Although it is still located firmly in LaBute's gender-wars wheelhouse, it offers a gentler view of what goes on there, in large part because he is at such pains to present the husband, for whatever reason, as a good guy.

Tonalities of the tricky dialogue

Unlike the alphas in his 1997 movie, In the Company of Men, gloating over their sick conquests, the characters in True Love do not intentionally cause damage; damage is just what marriage does to people who do not adequately know themselves until, say, two-thirds of the way through.

I wish I could report that the clever way this story fits the pre-existing LaBute playbook makes for a better experience overall, but the play is too slim and squishy to tell. The novel presentation, a worthy effort at exploring ways to keep theatre happening, doesn't wind up helping either.

Which is not to say that the actors don't do a great job of using their voices to put the various tonalities of the tricky dialogue across; they do - so much so that the colour-coding of the lights (pink for her, blue for him) feels not just old hat but gratuitous. Still, I found it impossible not to miss their bodies. If characters are going to love and lie, you want to see them do it.

To correct for that, as perhaps LaBute and Kandel intended, I began unconsciously but then deliberately to associate each voice with someone in the tiny audience. The "wife" sat across from me, often twirling her hair. The "husband" was kitty-corner to her until, oops, he fell asleep. Whether that was marriage I cannot say - but it was, finally, theatre. NYTIMES